Did you tweet the first time you felt the baby kick? Photograph: Andreas Pollok/Getty

My decision to keep the news of my pregnancy off Facebook has been met with disdain by many of my friends. "What do you mean, you're not acknowledging your child on Facebook? Not even when it's born?"

I was shocked by the reactions to my need for cyber privacy. It is an issue that would not even have arisen a few years ago. Am I really such a rarity in refusing to inform the world of my pregnancy on social media sites?

Several friends have viewed it as a kind of social suicide - online etiquette gone wrong. Some consider it downright rude, although it is not clear if the offence should be taken by the friends in question, for not having access to all areas of my life, or my unborn child, for being wilfully ignored in my online adventures.

For me, sharing this personal miracle is something to be done in person with the tangible responses included - a hug, a touch - not a poke on Facebook or an abbreviated exclamation on Twitter.

I feel I have rediscovered the art of the secret. In the real world, it's a secret that can't be kept for long, but online nobody need know that my world is about to be rocked to its very foundations by the birth of my first child. And why should they? I wouldn't walk down the street with a loudspeaker and announce to the world that I had been impregnated. "Yes, I had sex and am now with child – rejoice with me, world!"

I have a deep-rooted desire to give my child a choice, and the chance to meet the world before it is thrust into the online limelight. Where does it end if the very first photograph taken of you in the womb has been seen by thousands of people before you have even drawn breath? Does your Facebook profile get updated with a photo of your headstone when you die? What of the years in between?

These decisions are not to be taken lightly. Am I, in fact, depriving my child of an online history that may well be the norm in the future? Time will tell.

Friends feel differently. As soon as the obligatory three months of secrecy is up, scan photos are plastered all over their profile pictures, there are regular updates on the size of their embryo, as well as detailed descriptions of how "Mum" is doing. I find it all rather - dare I say it? - boring, and a bit yuck. I don't feel the need to know what your uterus is doing this week, thank you.

Then there are the post-birth pictures. The photographs of a shiny, greasy child pressed against a woman's breast with no bra and lots of skin make me feel slightly nauseous. By all means take these meaningful and beautiful (to you) photos and place them in a cherished album to embarrass your child with on their 18th birthday, but why share them with 200 people on Facebook?

I can hear you retorting that although I have decided not to place my news on Facebook, here I am writing about it for the Guardian. Well, I am not trying to hide the fact that I'm pregnant, but nor am I accompanying this article with a step-by-step account of my pregnancy and corresponding photographs.

Am I the only person that feels the need for some degree of privacy in an increasingly un-private world?